Mozilla Crowd Sources Customer Service Via Twitter

The Mozilla Project has launched the Army of Awesome customer service campaign. The initiative uses a basic Twitter search for the word "Firefox" to aggregate tweets into a list. Members of the Army of Awesome then pick a tweet that relates to a specific problem within Firefox and replies with advice or suggestions.

The Army of Awesome initiative is a good idea in theory, but because Mozilla can't refine their Twitter search to include only the tweets from people who actually need assistance. In the Army of Awesome's current state, the twitter feed contains mostly superfluous or observational tweets that aren't related to a service problem and in some cases are critical of Mozilla and the Firefox browser.

@mjgraves: #Firefox, I like you...but you are a pig. A big, fat, bloated, pig! You can do better. YOu must do better, or we shall be parted #fb

@joerogel: Firing Firefox up these days is like waking a 3,000-year-old monster back up from the dead

The initiative is in its infancy and users are tweeting their technical difficulties. A possible solution to help weed out unrelated tweets might be assigning a specific hash tag to the project, so that people in need of help could tag pertinent tweets, putting them on the radar of an Army of Awesome member. In the meantime, it's a sharp idea that needs a little more work.

Essentially, collect some adjectives for mood (e.g. adjectives for anger) and Porter-stem them, then look for all posts that are angry about Firefox. This would nip customer-dissatisfaction in the bud, without being overwhelmed by the mass of low-level requests for simple help.